Tag: climate march

Did you ever wonder how they got over 25,000 to participate in the climate march on November 29, 2015? Well, the organizers succeeded to get hordes of people involved in order to send a strong and compelling message to Ottawa’s policymakers. Their belief was that if all those who were interested in the event told 10 people, and those who learned about the event told 5 more people who told 5 others, then approximately 250 people will be informed about it. That’s how grassroots organizing works and precisely how they met their goals, trumping oil companies with virtually unlimited budgets for advertising and PR.

They also launched Facebook campaigns that encouraged interested parties to RSVP to the event and then share it to their friends and contacts on Facebook.

The Availability of 100% POSSIBLE Visual Materials

The organizers also provided a style guide for those who wanted to create their own visual materials for the event. All the information needed to create an effective visual material was provided, from fonts to logos and colours. Below are examples of what was available then.

Workshops were also held in select venues in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Gatineau days before the march so interested individuals and groups can learn how to make their own placards and banners.

Call for Volunteers

Organizing the climate march was very challenging so the organizers had to rely on volunteers. They welcomed anyone willing to help out during the march as well as the day before the event. All volunteers had to do was complete and contact form and someone from the organizing team reached out to them.

People gathered in downtown Ottawa on November 29, 2015 for a fun and friendly march at Parliament Hill. Attended by individuals, groups, and families, the event was held right before the UN Climate Summit in Paris, France. People were celebrating climate solutions and encouraged the Canadian government to be more proactive about climate change.

The march – 100% Possible: Marching for Climate Solutions and Justice – is just one of the many similar events organized around the globe that time. It was the flagship event in Canada and lasted for more than 3 hours at Parliament Hill, Ottawa’s seat of government.

Participants came all wearing green, the color that symbolizes renewable energy, hope, and the environment in general. Everyone got creative with what they wore to the event and there were flyers, banners, and posters all designed to encourage participation and collaboration for nature’s sake because a clean economy, especially in Canada, is 100% possible.

The city of Ottawa, barely two hours from Montreal and about 4 hours from Toronto, is easy to get to. The event was well attended because buses were available to shuttle participants to and from Ottawa. Due to the availability of transportation, more people signed up for the event, making it a huge success.

A huge whoop just went up around the office and the crowd as the official crowd count came in. 25,000 people took to the streets in sub zero temperatures to join our positive call for climate solutions!

They said it couldn’t be done, that people in Ottawa wouldn’t march, that people in Montreal (who do march) wouldn’t make the trip, that Toronto was too far, that “environmental” issues wouldn’t attract workers, christians, students, families, and government workers.

Today 25,000 of us proved them wrong: climate change is the biggest moral issue of our times and the movement to solve it continues to grow each and every month. We know we can’t sit on the sidelines and let the climate crisis continue to unfold around us without doing something about it.

The movement’s strength in Canada is also supported by Friday’s poll released by Nanos research, which found 73 per cent of Canadians agree that “climate change presents a significant threat to our economic future”. The crowd today looked like a cross section of Canada.

Indigenous elders and frontline communities, small children grinning from strollers, teenagers chanting their hearts out, raging grannies, First Nations grandmothers and children, and so many others of all ages in colourful shades of green. Signs were equally split between French and English.

One last thing on the crowd count. Gilles Lamothe, statistician professor at the University of Ottawa, shared his methodology. He used Jacob’s method to estimate the number of people at the Hill. From a photograph, he estimated the surface area that was occupied by the crowd at about 7,550 square meters and also the density of the crowd at about 3 persons per square meter. With the margin of error, he estimated the number of people at the hill to be between 20,385 to 24,915, with a few thousand that left before the marched reached the Hill, 90 mins after the start.